The Castaways of Eros

by Theo Varlet

  “But I don’t want her to die! After all, Uncle, she had some affection for me, and perhaps she still has, and I loved her dearly…without seeking to excuse her conduct, isn’t it possible that she’s got carried away by the movement, which has surpassed her anticipations? Anyway, we can’t leave her here…leave without first trying to save her.”

  Deep down, as Aurore points out to me, his absurd affection for that femme fatale is in the process of being gradually reborn, and he’s torn between that sentiment and the rebellion of his education and honesty. The conflict is translated into long intervals of melancholy and romantic sighs. Aurore has tried to put a little moral fiber back into him, but...

  25 December, 4th Erotian day.

  We have been getting to grips with the food problem.

  With respect to us, the matter is simple; all allocation of nourishment has been abolished, and we are getting by on our own means. An inventory of the storage-lockers on the rocket reveals that all the tinned food has been stolen by Ida. There is still some biscuit and cheese, enough to feed three of us for a fortnight; let’s hope that that will be sufficient.

  For the hominines, the manufacture of synthetic meat has been organized in the Palace. The Lacertians, however, only eat vegetables, and the siege has cut off the supply. It was indispensable to renew the stocks by means of an expedition.

  To demonstrate our good will, Aurore has offered Zilgor our collaboration, which he has accepted. Operating in the same fashion as during the transfer of the rocket, we three left the Palace via the rear with twenty hominines and four Mortals, equipped with respiratory masks, and went around the zone via the desert to the opposite point of the perimeter, to sneak into a warehouse that the revolutionaries had not thought of destroying. We brought back a fine cargo of crystalline fruits.

  That action, suggested to Zilgor by my wife, put an end to his period of stagnation. He has overcome the crisis. He has understood the need for the support of an active mind in galvanizing his will, rusted by so many centuries of serene quietude and routine automatism, and it is to Aurore that he has turned.

  26 December, 1st Erotian day.

  Can we hold on for another six times twenty-four hours? Can we wait long enough for the flight to be possible without risk of disaster?

  This morning, an attack of a new sort occurred: detonations, a rain of bombs launched by a sort of catapult. Several projectiles came in through the windows and killed a dozen of the defenders. Remembering the chemical formulae familiar of the terrorists of her nation, Ida has started manufacturing explosives: nitroglycerine or panclastite.

  That’s not enough to break down the armored walls of the Palace, but the unexpected bombardment has nevertheless troubled the Lacertians singularly.

  My wife has suggested to Zilgor that he resort to the science of Ektrol for defense. He let her leave without replying, but then called a council-meeting of the Twenty. A major decision seems to be imminent...

  27 December, 2nd Erotian day.

  For thirty-six hours, mysterious preparations have been under way: a continual bustle of red-caped engineers in the laboratories of the right wing. Is it the riposte that they’re preparing?

  In the meantime, the bowwows have stopped throwing bombs—but they’re manifesting a noisy joy, which is a bad omen. Once again Ida uses her megaphone to give us “a final ultimatum.” It’s becoming a mania. Only Oscar is more emotional than is warranted.

  At midday, Styal comes to tell my wife that Zilgor is asking for her, and he permits Oscar and me to accompany her.

  The twenty Immortals are with Zilgor, arranged in a semicircle, heads down, psychic eyes turned toward the Master. The latter addresses us.

  “Terrans, my decision is made. I shall not defend the last material debris of the civilization of Ektrol. When they are abolished forever, I want to take the surviving thought of Ektrol to your world…and if I see that humans are worthy of it, perhaps I shall make them a gift of the secrets that we have extracted from nature.

  “Terrans, I want to go with you.”

  Aurore scans the audience with a hesitant gaze.

  “We’re ready to welcome you, Master, but you’re numerous, and there is only one place available in our apparatus...”

  I’m not reassured. What if Zilgor were to reply: “One place! That’s not acceptable. You must leave your two companions...”

  To my great relief, however, he affirms, serenely: “One place will suffice for me.”

  What about the Twenty Immortals, then? Delivered to the revolutionaries, along with the other lacertians? They are looking at us now with benevolence; it is sufficient for them that we save the Unique. A breath of heroism has passed over the intelligences that animate those saurian bodies. I think of gladiators saluting the Emperor before the combat from which they will not come out alive. Ave Caesar!

  With a haughty bitterness, Zilgor replies to the unasked question: “They will die.”

  “Die? What, Master! But they have science. Even without you, they can arm themselves, defend themselves, defeat the savages, reestablish...”

  “No. The planet Eros is finished. It has played its role, which was to save the thought of Ektrol. Everyone will die—everyone in Khalifur, except me; I am that thought.”

  Aurore is about to protest. He imposes silence upon her with a fluorescent jet from his psychic eye.

  What is his intention? We divine something terrible. Will the secret of the energies that led to the destruction of the planet Ektrol serve once again to destroy everything that remains of the past civilization on Eros?

  There is no point in asking. The Master will only speak in his own time.

  A marvelous serenity hangs over the Twenty, and we perceive it while they are communicating with the central brain. Like the Stoics of antiquity who glimpsed the conception of the superhuman, albeit with respect to a far narrower ideal, by comparison with the new consciousness of cosmic duty, the Twenty are making the rational sacrifice of their individual lives and their species, which will perish forever, in the flux of the universe in progress toward the future...

  Only the globule of thought incarnate in Zilgor will cross space and travel to Earth, to transmit the sublime spark...

  In that long-lived lacertian the destiny of the dead and vanished planet was summarized, waiting on Eros for the propitious moment…the entire evolution of Ektrol, since the dawn of life, and the birth of intelligence among the saurians…the centuries of civilization and billions of thinking beings...

  At a sign from the Master, Styal escorts us out. I shiver with horror and admiration, and with Aurore’s help I support poor Oscar, who is weeping over the fate that awaits Ida.

  In the corridors, the hominines, stupid and cheerful, well-nourished on synthetic meat, are circulating busily, like the good slaves they are.

  Down below in the plaza, the agitation of the bowwows portends a new attack, but the armored portals, capable of resisting aerial bombing, have nothing to fear from the Russian’s feeble chemically-improvised petards.

  We can still hold out for the time necessary for a reasonable departure...

  Presumptuous optimism!

  Three house later, the following morning, the catastrophe occurs.

  Scarcely have we finished dressing than a massive explosion shakes the edifice, like the explosion of a mine or an earthquake. A triumphant clamor goes up in the plaza, and the song of the Internationale rings out more vigorously than ever...

  From inside the Palace itself, howls reach us, and the noise of fighting. The main door has been blown up; the revolutionaries have got in!

  No hesitation is possible. It’s too soon, but too bad. No matter what the risk, it’s necessary to depart!

  Everything is ready in the rocket, fortunately. And we put on our respirators.

  From top to bottom of the edifice, the pandemonium is increasing: the noise of collapses, mingled with detonations, announce a desperate defense by the besieged, who are responding t
o the invaders’ grenades by throwing furniture at them...

  On emerging from our lodgings we encounter Styal, who has come looking for us, and depart with him at a trot. A frightful chaos of hominines and lacertians is swirling through the corridors, invaded from beneath by acrid smoke red with nitrogenous vapors.

  On the threshold of the Observatory, twenty meters away, Zilgor appears, his respirator harnessed.

  At the other end of the gallery, however, neglected by the defenders, a horde of savages unexpectedly surges forth, with Ida at their head!

  She sees us, and her shrill voice, piercing the tumult, shouts: “Oscar!”

  I’ve drawn my revolver, but Oscar hurls himself upon me, mad with despair, and tears the weapon from my hand. I grab hold of him to prevent him from running toward the advancing Russian, who is calling to him. Oscar is about to escape, I’m weakening in spite of my wife’s help—but a flood of hominines comes to the rescue; Zilgor makes a gesture and a paralyzing wand cuts the knees out from under my antagonist, pinning him down with lethargy. I get up, and grab hold of the boy bodily, without rancor…he’s so light…in order to take him with us.

  In the rotunda of the Observatory. The door, which is barricaded in haste, will stop the assailants—surprised in their turn by the furious resistance of our defenders, fighting to protect the Master’s departure—for a few minutes more.

  As we pass by, the green-caped Immortals grouped around the housing of the great telescope, incline their lacertian heads, in a supreme fluorescent farewell of their physics eyes...

  But no one follows us. Only four of us—Zilgor, then my wife, then me, still carrying the inert Oscar—plunge into the little stairway of the airlock. Masks are fitted. The internal door of the lock closes and muffles the sound of the battle. The exterior door opens. Here we are in full sunlight, beneath the black and starry ether, on the terrace, where the rocket is waiting for us...

  XXVIII. The Secret of the Ultra-X

  What a frightful memory, that return journey!

  First of all, the premature departure: a throw of the dice, ninety-five chances in a hundred against us. We’ll reach the Earth, yes, but with not enough fuel in the tanks to be able to carry out the atmospheric maneuvers that will allow us to land at a determined point. Just enough will remain to counter a fraction of our momentum, so that the apparatus does not burn up like a vulgar bolide as it passes through the atmosphere. It will be necessary to resort to the worse-than-scabrous recourse of a plunge into a sea deep enough to deaden our fall.

  Ten, twelve days: twelve days of weightlessness and space-sickness, although, on the outward journey, four already seemed so punishing...

  And, in addition to that prospect, and the dramatic memories of the departure, the lugubrious event of the early hours...

  When, after twenty-five minutes of acceleration quintupling weight and deafening prostration in the thunder of the motor, the silence, the loss of weight and the first symptoms of nausea ensued…I darted a glance at my two companions in the cabin.

  As I entered, I had deposited Oscar on the upper bunk and the Master of Eros had lain down on the one below, while I contented myself with the divan of the storage-lockers. Level with me, Zilgor, curled up like the hammer of a gun, had his back to me. I saw him draw his white cape around him with his slender green reptilian fingers, and then he did not move again, as if he were asleep—but I could not see his face. Was he in pain? He replied to my question with an indistinct murmur. In fact, it would be better for him if he could fall unconscious.

  As for me, I had resolved to let myself spend as much time as possible unconscious, outside the hours when I was taking my turn on watch.

  On the upper shelf, Oscar was still nursing the effects of the paralyzing wand. I heard him moaning feebly. He as weeping for his dear Ida, doubtless cursing me for abducting him…for which he would thank me later...

  Suddenly, a cry from Aurore reached me through the engine-room hatch.

  “Gaston! Come see, quickly...”

  Anguished, I joined her, and found her hunched over the periscope. She moved her head aide to make room for mine, while saying: “Too late, It’s over. The explosion didn’t last ten seconds.”

  On the ruddy face of the planet Eros, as large as the full moon, I recognized the little fly-speck that was the location of Khalifur. Instead of the scintillation produced by the ensemble of the steel domes, as I remembered having seen them an hour before our arrival, however there was nothing but a crater with jagged edges, from which yellow smoke was drifting...

  Without my wife having any need to tell me more, I understood.

  Khalifur has disappeared. Zilgor’s last orders have been carried out. Lacertians, hominines...and Ida with them…there is no longer a single living being on Eros.

  “Not a word to Oscar,” Aurore whispers to me, her teeth chattering in horror as she leans on my shoulder.

  Mute and distressed, we watch the spirals of smoke expanding, gradually effacing the contours of the crater.

  So that is the result of our coming! We have brought war and final devastation to that world, which had striven to realize the noble dream of pure thought, by eliminating violence and the brutal passions. But those passions, revived by terrestrial ferment, have taken their revenge, in total.

  What, then, can be concluded?

  One does not have the right to separate science from life in motion. It is prejudicial to attempt to detach the absolute from the quotidian, the static from the dynamic. It is only Beauty that can say, with Baudelaire: “I am as beautiful, O mortals, as a dream in stone...”

  For long minutes, we stayed there, thinking dolorous thoughts, in the increasing nausea of space-sickness.

  My wife finally shook herself out of it. “What about Zilgor? How is he standing up to it?”

  We went up to the cabin. The Master of Eros was lying on the lower bunk. His limbs folded up, in the same position where I had left him. We leaned over him. Poor fellow! His saurian face, with its dry granular skin, usually pale green, had taken on a frightful lividity. His eyes were closed and he seemed to have stopped breathing.

  As Aurore approached, only his psychic eye opened, impressing a black hole in the gilded plate of his skull. He hissed, in a breath: “I shall not see your Earth. The genius of Ektrol…forbidden...

  In the enormous psychic pupil, fluorescences glimmered, as if he were trying to express something else. But what was the point? And the lashless eyelid closed, stoically.

  Anxiously, Aurore raised up the padded breastplate, put a pillow on the slender thorax, and looked at me in helpless bewilderment.

  “His heart has almost ceased beating. He’s dying. Oh, Lord! And we’ll never know...”

  “What if you were to give him an injection of caffeine?” I suggested.

  She shrugged her shoulders despairingly. She was right. The physiology of a saurian was evidently beyond the scope of human medication.

  Gripping the dying Lacertian’s hands, she begged him: “Master…O, Master, won’t you tell me, in the name of cosmic thought, won’t you reveal the formula…the composition of the ultra-X mirrors? Don’t allow that conquest of your science to be lost forever...”

  This time, he did not even raise the eyelid. His thin reptilian lips pated, to let out his last, almost imperceptible words: “Bad…war...”

  And that was all. A slight contraction agitated the features of the lacertian face, followed by cadaverous rigidity...

  Zilgor was dead.

  The profound difference of species between him and us excluded any veritable sympathy, and yet, that death mortified both of us. It was not only regret for being unable to show to the Earth—if we ever got there!—that genius specimen of another planetary evolution, and perhaps obtain from him a prodigious boost to human science.

  Obviously, it was painful to see the finest result of our voyage to Eros abolished in that way, but what afflicted us most of all was a sentiment vaster than universal vanity,
before the corpse of that saurian, now the mere detritus of a zoo, but who, a few minutes before, had been the equal of a Newton, a Galileo or an Einstein.

  What is the point of the cosmic miracle of thought, surging forth here and there on one of the worlds that are infinitesimal atoms scattered in the immensity? What is the point of the thought of Ektrol? What is the point of that of the Earth?

  What should we do with the corpse? We could not keep it for twelve days.

  Even when we had expelled it through the man-hole, however, it continued to haunt us—for in the void, whether inside the spaceship or outside, it continued to travel with the same velocity as us. It was necessary to mask one of the portholes to avoid the continual sight of the Master of Eros floating in space like a grotesque and lamentable mannequin.

  Life went on, however, and our organic existence…that existence slowed down by weightlessness and space-sickness.

  Aurore’s persuasive persistence reckoned with the inconsolable depression to which our nephew initially abandoned himself. He remained melancholy, but consented to take his turns on watch, and we thus stood watch alternately in eight-hour shifts. Or, at least, we were supposed to be on watch. For my part, those hours were scarcely differentiated from the others, and I remained in a persistent state of toxic torpor, tormented by dreams.

  We were no more able than on the outward journey to vanquish the repugnance of our stomachs, and in twelve days, we were scarcely able to nibble a few biscuits apiece, with an occasional glass of cold tea. It’s true that in those abnormal conditions, the organism’s expenditure is much reduced.

  The last two days, in particular, were terrible. Even Aurore, at the limit of her endurance, allowed herself to be overtaken by drowsiness, and for I don’t know how many hours, no one aboard was alert.